Meg 2 Is Not the Timeless Masterpiece I Hoped and Expected It Would Be. In Fact, It's Actually Kinda Dumb
I have so much work that I NEED to do for The Fractured Mirror book, my freelance work for Fatherly, Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, the Travolta/Cage podcast and the Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas Substack newsletter that I feel like I’m cheating if I do work that doesn’t fit into any of those boxes.
Even My World of Flops, a column I have been writing for SIXTEEN YEARS and introduced the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to the world can feel like playing hooky since the column doesn’t have the same urgency as stuff I have to write about because people are waiting on it and/or I have deadlines.
That’s one of the reasons that I love going to the movie theater with my eight year son Declan to see the big new kid-friendly movie of the week because that allows me to combine work that I need to do for my kick-ass newsletter that you should definitely subscribe to with parenting.
Also, I loved going to the movies as a kid and I want to share that experience with a son who loves movies and pop culture and whose big, beautiful, ADHD brain overflows with ideas and energy and excitement.
That’s why I was hoping that Meg 2: The Trench would win this week’s Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas poll to determine which movie I’d write about this weekend over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
Don’t get me wrong: I do want to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. I’m a fan of Seth Rogen though I can only imagine how successful he’d be if he put down the marijuana pipe and pursued a straight edge lifestyle like myself.
Incidentally, I did see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and it’s great! Read my four and a half star review here.
I’m a Gen-Xer so Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is important to me in an unimportant kind of way. When I was in middle school I was obsessed with reading the trades. I also paid attention to the stock market for some reason.
I remember telling my dad to buy stock in New Line, the studio that put out the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, because I was sure that it was going to be a big hit.
I was right! The movie was, at the time, the top-grossing independent film of all time. New Line’s stock skyrocketed. Unfortunately my dad was too busy being broke and impoverished and having no money to hoard New Line stock.
I was excited about seeing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem with my son but I also really wanted to get super-high and see Meg 2: The Trench in 3-D.
Then I realized that I have made a very modest living out of writing about bad and ridiculous movies and there was no good reason not to experience the tacky majesty of Meg 2: The Trench in its ideal form (baked out of my mind and in 3-D) and write about it for this website.
So I blazed some of that sweet, sweet leaf and headed off to a 9:25 3-D showing of Meg 2: The Trench because that’s what God and the universe wanted me to do. I did not go in expecting a great movie, or even a particularly good movie. I just wanted Meg 2: The Trench to be dumb fun like its predecessor.
A premise like “Jason Statham fights a giant prehistoric shark monster the size of a football stadium” should be hard to fuck up. It’s seemingly foolproof and idiot-proof.
Unfortunately the fools and idiots who made Meg 2: The Trench fucked up big time by devoting way too much time and effort to a subplot nobody in their right mind could possibly care about.
I wanted to see Meg 2: The Trench for one reason and one reason only: to see Jason Statham fight giant sharks. Unfortunately Meg 2: The Trench takes forever to deliver the goods. By the time the bald action icon is scooting around on a jet-ski alongside multiple megaladons like some kind of prehistoric shark-hating Kenny Powers it’s too little, too late.
But before Meg 2: The Trench broke my heart by being somehow sub-par it at least kicks off with what I can say without hyperbole is the greatest opening scene in the history.
We begin 65 million years ago, in the age of the dinosaurs. Some treacherous looking Dinos are gallivanting about when BOOM a motherfucking T-Rex devours them in an insatiable furor.
Just when it looks like the movie can’t possibly get any more awesome A MEGALODON devours the T-Rex in a single ferocious bite.
THAT’S HOW YOU BEGIN A MOVIE: with a giant prehistoric shark making a light snack out of the most ferocious dinosaur of them all.
If Meg 2: The Trench had been to maintain that level of excitement until its final frame I would have no problem crowning it the greatest film of all time, narrowly beating out Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy.
Unfortunately Med 2: The Trench peaks, and peaks hard, in its first three minutes. It’s all downhill from there.
We then make the terrible mistake of flashing forward 65 million years, to the Stathamazoa era, a time when massive Jason Stathams roamed the earth, getting cranked, transporting things, driving sports cars at unsafe speeds, taking on giant sharks and generally being a badass.
As the film opens Statham’s Jonas Taylor is committing righteous environmentalist crimes. But when he learns that Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing), the brother of his late wife has bought Mana One, an underwater research facility alongside Hillary Driscoli (Sienna Guillory), and is training a baby Meg he becomes concerned.
The idea of a sympathetic Megalodon, or at least one that is not pure evil, is an intriguing one. But it’s another promising idea that leads nowhere. There’s nothing remotely likable or anthropomorphic about a Megalodon, even a baby.
They look like dead-eyed, extra-large killers at any age and the film doesn’t make much of an effort to portray them as anything other than blood-thirsty, human-eating monsters of the deep.
Meg 2 has a LOT of problems. A lot. But its biggest problem is probably the central role corporate intrigue plays in the plot. Not all is well at Mana One. There is a mole inside the organization who is working with an evil mining company that is scooping up super-powerful, valuable minerals in a secret underwater station.
I could not care less about that bullshit. It reminded me of the diamond-smuggling subplots in seemingly half the comedies of the 1980s and early 1990s.
I come to this franchise to see a big-ass shark eat people and dinosaurs and battle Jason Statham, not see two businesses compete in a literally kill or be killed competition.
The fact that I spent pretty much entirety of Meg 2: The Trench thinking about how unrealistic it is that a mere man like Jonas would personally take down so many giant sharks rather than glorying in the vulgar awesomeness of Jason Statham tooling around on a jet-ski, bringing the pain to every Megalodon he encounters, speaks to just how profoundly the film does not work.
It’s got everything. Megalodons! Jason Statham! A jet-ski! A bunch of dumb tourists serving as Megalodon food.
There’s even a giant octopus creature with massive tentacles and yet Meg 2 fails all the same.
In its third act Meg 2 moves the action to a floating pleasure palace called Fun Island. It’s a repeat of the climax of the first film, right down to the central role an adorable little Yorkie plays in the proceedings but it’s just not the same.
In the not so grand tradition of arbitrary sequels Meg 2: The Trench, which somehow cost over one hundred million dollars to make despite seemingly cutting corners at every opportunity, does just about everything its predecessor did but bigger and worse.
The film could have been saved if only it contained more scenes of megalodons eating dinosaurs but this stupid movie is just too damn obsessed with corporate intrigue to give us the Dino-chomping action we both crave and deserve.
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